Report: Boulder stands out among Colo. cities for criminalizing act of sleeping

Jon, who said he was homeless, takes a nap under a tree near the intersection of Canyon Boulevard and Ninth Street on Wednesday in Boulder. He asked that his last name not be used. (Jeremy Papasso / Staff Photographer)

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been corrected to show that it costs $69 a day to house inmates in the Boulder County Jail, not that Boulder County charges the city of Boulder that much a day for municipal inmates.

Boulder writes far more tickets for illegal camping than any other Colorado city, according to a report from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law's Homeless Advocacy Policy Project, a policy choice that researchers estimate has cost Boulder at least $966,000 over a four-year period.

"They keep saying that they want to do something, but that keeps coming down to criminalization," said Bill Cohen, a Boulder attorney who works pro bono on homeless issues, referring to the City Council. "It just makes things worse. It makes it harder for the person who is trying to improve their situation, trying to get a job, trying to get benefits, because of that criminal record."

City officials, for their part, question whether the report tells the whole story of homeless enforcement in Boulder.

"What I see is that this is only half the picture, and the other half of the picture is that people are getting connected to services and we're making things better," Councilman Andrew Shoemaker said.

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The report analyzed citations under so-called "anti-homeless" ordinances, such as trespassing, parks hours regulations, public urination, panhandling and camping, in 23 Colorado cities.

Boulder wasn't the only city using municipal ordinances to target behaviors that homeless people engage in at high rates. Denver, with around 3,800 homeless people, the largest population in the metro area, issued almost 10,000 citations against homeless people under the 11 ordinances identified in the report between 2010 and 2014, and the number of citations increased 32 percent during that time period, even though the homeless population remained relatively constant.

But Boulder, with the second largest homeless population in the metro area, around 440 according the the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative's point-in-time survey, issued 1,767 tickets for illegal camping between 2010 and 2014, most of them to homeless defendants.

Camping is defined in Boulder ordinance as sleeping outside with shelter, which can include a blanket or sleeping bag.

The report said some jurisdictions seem to use other charges for activities that might be considered camping in Boulder, with Denver writing more trespassing tickets and Colorado Springs writing more tickets for being in parks after hours. Denver police also tend to use "move on" orders to get homeless people to leave an area where they are sleeping, the researchers found.

However, Nantiya Ruan, a law professor at DU and editor and faculty coordinator for the report, for the Homeless Advocacy Policy Project, said Boulder's camping ban citations are still significant.

"Giving someone a ticket and putting them into the criminal justice system is significantly worse than other types of contact," she said. "We understand that move on orders are also problematic, but by writing someone a ticket that they cannot pay, you are setting up a debtors' prison, and then they spend time in jail, and then they can't get a job. It's a perpetuation of the cycle of poverty."

Shoemaker, who has been a supporter on City Council of increased enforcement across a variety of areas, reacted strongly to the idea that Boulder runs a debtors' prison. He said the city's municipal court often waives fines and connects homeless defendants with social services.

"Our municipal court is one of the most progressive in the state," he said.

As council members consider how or whether to modify the camping ban, they have asked for detailed information from the municipal court on camping enforcement and consequences.

They want to know how often tickets are written just for camping, as opposed to camping and other offenses; how often warrants for failure to appear are issued in each circumstance; and how often a person ends up serving jail time for a citation that was only for camping.

They also want to know how many unique individuals have been ticketed for violating the camping ban, what the police department's policy is on how officers should deal with people they encounter camping, and what the municipal court's practice is on sentencing for camping violations.

The researchers estimated the jail costs of enforcing homeless violations by tracking a representative sample of Denver citations all the way to disposition and determining the average jail stay for each offense. For camping, that was one day in jail. Ruan said researchers could not do a Boulder-specific calculation because the city would not provide individual citation numbers that would allow them to track cases.

The Boulder County Sheriff's Office says it costs $69 a day to house inmates, while the Vera Institute's standard for the cost of a day in jail puts the cost at $110.64. The DU report uses projections based on Denver jail sentences for homeless ordinance violations and Boulder jail costs to estimate the cost to Boulder of criminalizing homelessness of nearly $1 million over four years.

Ruan said the real cost is probably much higher, but she considers the report's estimate to have a strong justification.

Sheriff Joe Pelle said that any given time, between 25 and 35 prisoners at the Boulder County Jail are there solely on municipal offenses, and the majority of them are homeless. That's a relatively small portion of the roughly 500 prisoners in the jail at any given time, but their presence contributes to overcrowding, he said. The municipal court requires cash bonds, which homeless defendants can't pay, so those prisoners stay longer, and when homeless defendants have warrants for more serious crimes in other jurisdictions, the municipal warrants cause complications and delays in transferring them.

"Using the justice system is a really, really expensive remedy, and it doesn't stop it," Pelle said. "It doesn't change the behavior. You can write these guys tickets all day, and they wad them up and throw them away. They don't care."

Pelle said he doesn't know what the answers are, but it would be better to put that money into services.

Cohen said he hopes the report opens eyes to how the city is choosing to spend its money.

"There are a lot of gaps (in services) that could be filled in with the money they would save by not sending people to jail," he said.

Boulder spokeswoman Sarah Huntley said Boulder police write camping tickets where other communities use trespassing and other violations, but that practice creates a transparent record that shows the scale of the problem.

She said officers consider a range of options when they find someone sleeping without shelter, including the weather, whether there are other options that night, the person's attitude and whether there are outstanding warrants.

"There might be a failure to appear warrant, or it might be a second or a third camping violation," she said.

Boulder already spends a lot of money on homelessness: $800,000 on emergency shelter and $1.5 million on non-profit agencies like Bridge House that provide case management and other services.

The city has also spent $8 million, starting in the early 1980s, to help build space for 326 beds for homeless individuals through the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, Attention Homes, Bridge House, Safehouse and Emergency Family Assistance Association, as well as the permanent supportive housing at 1175 Lee Hill Drive.

While summer shelter remains a problem, she said that from October to April, "it is not accurate to say that people have no place else to go."

That assertion drew an expletive from Michael Homner, a formerly homeless man who served three years on the board of BOHO, which provides emergency warming shelter at participating churches and synagogues, before he gave a calmer response.

The shelter has 160 beds in the winter, but individuals cannot stay at the shelter for more than 90 nights in a season. BOHO has a flexible capacity, but it can't help everyone.

"A lot of people who are homeless have PTSD, and they just cannot come into a room with 200 people and have all that static noise behind them," he said. "They cannot handle that."

People with disability checks used to take advantage of cheap motels, but with many of them closed and torn down, there are fewer places for people to go. Some people head into the canyons or for the national forest, where camping is legal.

"That's the big complaint up in Ned," Homner said, "that they're all going up there because of Boulder's camping ban."

Homner said finding a safe place and take care of other physical needs is a huge source of stress for homeless people and can cause or exacerbate mental health issues.

"People are so worried, and that is a stress level that no one who is housed can understand," he said. "A lot of it is worrying about tickets. You sleep with one eye open. You can see now how our city deals with it. They look with a smile, but they have the hammer behind it."

Homner, Cohen and many homeless advocates want the city to set up designated areas where camping is legal and look into tiny home communities to provide more long-term housing. They said these approaches have been used in other communities and aren't novel or untried. The homeless community can largely police themselves if the city provides some portable toilets and trash service, they said.

Mayor Suzanne Jones said the report will be part of the broader conversation, along with the data that City Council has requested.

"No one wants to make life harder for unhoused people, but allowing people to set up camp in our public parks is not a workable solution either," she said.

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